Healer boycott in 5.0

[dezzmont]

I am not going to disagree a lot would need to change to make healing more resource based, but I do think you overstate the 'AFK healer' issue. Other action MMOs do a good job of making healers both DPS and heal while everyone is mostly dodging abilities and make healing feel non-trivial. This is not some unsolved design issue plauging more modern MMOs. In GW2 you can run out of healing and you don't 'go afk' when you top someone off. You don't even do that in WoW, I have played and mained healer in WoW for ages and the idea of a healer running out of mana and AFKing is sorta outrageous, for one running out of mana is unusual and indicates something else in the raid went wrong, and for another you have tools that do not use mana. It is fully possible to have a healing focused job with limited healing resources that does not ever go AFK. I mean Astro already kinda is that with bad mana tools and a lot of focus on oGCD healing.

You are contextualizing running out of mana or topping off on resource based healers as 'go afk' but in reality running out of mana in resource based MMOs is a fail state on par with the tank and off tank running out of HP, and it isn't hard to design a fight for more incidental unavoidable damage to exist without changing the core of FFXIV. It isn't something that just inevitably happens unless the healer is bad.

I DO agree FFXIV probably shouldn't go the pure 'mana chugging healer' route. There is a reason Astro feels so good, and that is because it has healer resources that are limited but don't limit your APM: High cooldowns and a lack of focus on DOT which makes efficiently healing at specific times with ED a delight and viscerally rewarding. A big issue with FFXIV healers is that a lot of their healing is very efficient GCD heals that lack real weaknesses because every healer is sorta designed to be able to bring the entire team to full health with their AOE heal spam multiple times without even taking a break. Because every healer has an AOE heal nuke, a single target mantinence heal no one should use, and a single target serious heal that is infinitely spammable, healing is always somewhat trivial, and thus how much healing output you have and how efficient it is is also trivial: The fact that the WHM has regens (which increase mana and action efficiency) and has mana efficient bursts doesn't matter because everyone is already so good at sustaining every aspect of healing at all times that being slightly better doesn't matter.

I am not saying 'DPS focused healers with 100% uptime are bad and shouldn't exist.' They definitely should keep at least one healer like that. Cat druid healer in WoW was great for that reason and I am eternally sad its gone. But you should definitely try to empathize more with the people who played healers in other MMOs and found healer content in FFXIV is... really just quite terrible because it doesn't focus at all on the support/team monitoring aspects of play they are used to. Like the fact that WoW does healing objectively better than FFXIV is troubling, especially as we get more WoW refugees. No one who enjoys Priest in WoW, Water elementalist in GW2, Operative in SWTOR, Logi in EvE, ect, is going to enjoy the healers in FFXIV purely because of the current philosophy of 'minimize focus on healing resources' which is objectively not a good thing long term for the health of the game.

That said, we probably agree more than we disagree in the sense healing ATM feels very unrewarding. So I can, again, get behind this idea of voicing discontent. I just want to re-emphasize that 'I want to play healer to focus on healing well, not tossing out an overly basic DPS rotation, even in roulette content' is not an imagined or even uncontroversial desire, which some people seem to be implying is the case.

[Urthdigger]

I am not going to disagree a lot would need to change to make healing more resource based, but I do think you overstate the 'AFK healer' issue. Other action MMOs do a good job of making healers both DPS and heal while everyone is mostly dodging abilities and make healing feel non-trivial. This is not some unsolved design issue plauging more modern MMOs. In GW2 you can run out of healing and you don't 'go afk' when you top someone off. You don't even do that in WoW, I have played and mained healer in WoW for ages and the idea of a healer running out of mana and AFKing is sorta outrageous, for one running out of mana is unusual and indicates something else in the raid went wrong, and for another you have tools that do not use mana. It is fully possible to have a healing focused job with limited healing resources that does not ever go AFK. I mean Astro already kinda is that with bad mana tools and a lot of focus on oGCD healing.

I've played a number of games where healer DPS tools were generally regarded as a waste of MP that could be spent on healing, either to improve survivability in the fight or to reduce downtime before the next fight, and thus we had a lot of AFK healers. True they could separate healing and DPS resources to make it resource-driven without encouraging AFK healers, but I don't see SE doing that. The reason why I brought those up is that every time healer DPS stuff gets brought up, there's always those healing purists who feel that healers should NEVER DPS, that they are a HEALER and HEALERS HEAL and that's what they are for and should focus 100% of their attention on, and if DPS options get nerfed they should never complain because they are a HEALER and are to HEAL and aren't there to DPS.

I was basically stating WHY healers focus on DPS in this game, and why it's tightly coiled around how the game functions as a whole.

[dezzmont]

I was basically stating WHY healers focus on DPS in this game, and why it's tightly coiled around how the game functions as a whole.

I definitely don't think healers should be disallowed from DPSing. Honestly its really cool that in FFXIV healers are allowed to just wail on the enemy during downtime, and I think that is an improvement on the role. The issue is that healing in FFXIV has very little in common with healing in other MMOs, and healing in other MMOs is not unpopular by any stretch, so there is a large group of MMO players just not getting what they want.

Seperate healing resources already kinda exist, they just aren't used very well.

Aetherflow, for example, is a highly limited supply of intense healing in theory, but is undone by the fact that scholar heal spells are already low enough mana you can just brute force heal checks with GCD heals, so the resource is used almost exclusively offensively (in a way that also restores the mana you essentially only spend on healing spells as scholar). This is why I am not too sad nor surprised that Energy Drain is gone, energy drain as an aetherflow ability just kinda mucked up what Aetherflow was meant to be doing. You don't really spend mana as a scholar on offensive actions, you can cast offensively literally infinitely even while healing, as offensive spells are a net positive mana by quite a large margin, not even impacting your mana efficiency. This essentially means Scholars have two healing resources, mana and aetherflow.

If Senix wanted to do so, they could make the mana based healing less efficient for scholar, remove some mana regen, and you would have limited healing and unlimited DPS, which probably would be the change that makes healing interesting (especially if more incidental damage hits the team that pressures you to monitor multiple targets and decide between using single target highly mana efficient heals like physic, a mana inefficient aoe heal, and one of three big heal spells you can cast for free every X seconds.

This isn't what they have done (And while I think the changes made healing a bit less braindead it is still pretty braindead), so I am skeptical healing is going to get better, but it is not hard to imagine a system that maintains DPS uptime for healers while also making healing not an afterthought outside of high end content. That is really what is sticking in my craw: This is presented as a dichotomy between SE nerfing healer DPS and healers caring a lot about DPS, but for me as a healer main in literally every MMO besides FFXIV, I don't care about that all that much and more care that healers spend almost no time thinking about healing, how to do it well, when to cast what, how to manage healing resources, ect. But at least Senix is... very slightly moving towards where I want by doing things like nerfing Scholar a bit in terms of how comically trivial its mana situation is, forcing you to consider aetherflow as a healing resource, giving WHMs a reason to care about healing in terms of offensive power via the Black Lilly, ect.

I don't really agree with either side of the debate in this thread.

I like the state Square Enix is pushing the game towards more than people calling for scholar nerfs to be reverted. For real, while I like how scholar has a lot of cool reactive mitigation abilities, most of the people I talk to think its bonkers power level and versatility is just bad for the game, and I super agree, there was NO way Scholar was walking into Shadowbringers without losing some major aspect of its absurd power level. You literally can't make a fourth healer as long as scholar is a mana efficient mitigation healer with instant cast heal nukes it can cast every 60 seconds, pseudo regens in the form of manaless and actionless mantinence healing, and multiple instant manaless mitigation abilities, as well as having the top dps over time vs single target of all 3 healers. Like... it doesn't matter how high the skill ceiling of Scholar is, it just does everything you could want a healer to do besides provide raid DPS. Any time someone comes in and talks about how scholar is ruined and how great it was in SB strikes me as having very little empathy or foresight to the healer situation, and while I know YOU are not saying it, a lot of people here seem to think very disingenuously the status quo is not currently also a problem. At the very least now WHM has justification for existing by having better pDPS and sorta mirroring black mage as 'highest damage healer if you can pull it off but you gotta know the fights to maximize casting uptime' healer. Very nice mirror to its counterpart.

However, as much as I kinda generally like the state of the game Square Enix is pushing towards more than the status quo, I don't like it enough to want to switch to healer, so its sorta moot, and I think if it isn't going to actually change my behavior the fact I like it better doesn't trump the fact it kinda sucks for a lot of people. I would ideally just like healing to be interesting, but if that wasn't the case I would prefer healers to be happy more than things to be slightly more to my tastes despite not being my tastes, and I can definitely see why it is upsetting to focus on reducing DPS over actually making healing good (which would likely involve a NERF to how efficiently you can put out a full heal). Like healers enjoying the game is more important than an incremental change that doesn't actually fix anything, it just makes people happy with the status quo less happy while not making anyone unhappy more happy, if that makes sense.

[Truen]

If Senix wanted to do so, they could make the mana based healing less efficient for scholar, remove some mana regen, and you would have limited healing and unlimited DPS, which probably would be the change that makes healing interesting (especially if more incidental damage hits the team that pressures you to monitor multiple targets and decide between using single target highly mana efficient heals like physic, a mana inefficient aoe heal, and one of three big heal spells you can cast for free every X seconds.

Yeah right. They basically want the three healing jobs to be clones who's biggest differences are cosmetic, not functional design. They assume people aren't clever enough to understand even moderately difficult rotations, and because of this they've turned the healing role into what you see in 5.0. Bland. Basic, bleh.

[dezzmont]

Yeah right. They basically want the three healing jobs to be clones who's biggest differences are cosmetic, not functional design. They assume people aren't clever enough to understand even moderately difficult rotations, and because of this they've turned the healing role into what you see in 5.0. Bland. Basic, bleh.

To be extraordinarily clear, 5.0 is likely going to be better than SB in that regard, because now WHM has a purpose (Specifically it no longer lags over 1k potency per minute in single target content behind despite having LESS utility. Yes, I did the math, I think the idea of Shadowflare and Energy Drain coming back is.... unlikely to say the least), scholar can't depend as much on auto-healing and will need to devote more casts to healing. Astro always was the thinking man's healer, and the focus increasing on ED and ES sticking about still means it is the 'foresight' healer, which I like a lot.

Will it be good? Eh? Will healers now consistently fail routine healer content? Probably not. It does seem like there are some legitimately good changes (Double Essential Dignity means Astros spend even more time 'healer edging' which is delightful, scholar DPS getting beaten down hard means that WHM is now a mirror of BLM in terms of being 'best DPS if you are really slick and know the fight' which rewards mastery, ect) but nothing that changes the game a lot. Either you are going to have no downtime cuz you are mashing your offensive spells, or no downtime because your mashing basic heals. I don't see either reality actually making healers think about healing, which is very different than them spending TIME healing. You don't think about DPS on a healer now, you spend time doing dps. Likewise, in Shadowbringers, you probably won't think less or more about DPS or healing, you just DPS less and heal more, judging by the dungeon playthroughs. It is just you still hitting basic abilities. Its sorta why I am not mourning the cards changing despite liking astro, you generally don't think about the cards that much outside VERY niche situations, the way old cards worked just made it so there were unilaterally better combos based on party comp and you were mostly hoping RNG gave em to you. Like yeah you could I guess use Spear to help heal but... well... it is FFXIV healing, you don't need spear to help you heal, that was a novelty. Astros won't necessarily be thinking more with these new cards, but at the very least they will be more focused on them (because your needs DO actually change over time), and the fact you can redraw like crazy means the overall experience is less frustrating. I don't want to DPS-splain (I can't stress enough how I don't heal that often in FFXIV and am more giving the perspective of the kinda person Square Enix is likely TRYING to please, the healer from WoW, KOTOR, EvE, GW2, Neverwinter, Champions, take your pick, who is deeply unimpressed with FFXIV healing. I side with you unhappy folk as long as they recognize the fact that the way things are now isn't great for everyone either!) but everything I found interesting about Astro as a longtime MMO healer got more interesting.

Like... I dunno man. Healing in FFXIV never was good, and all this focus on potency decreases and losing offensive spells kinda makes me feel pretty isolated in this debate because I super don't care either way (But totally support your desire to Broil/Stone/Antilixir people instead of having pure downtime, #chemisthealerwhen?) compared to desires neither filled the status quo or the way things will be in HW.

Like... not to be mean... but SB healing was pretty bland and basic too... People talk a lot about healers 'afking' in WoW when they top folks off... but they aren't, despite the fact they aren't casting. There is something truly amazing about the act of dedicating all of your focus to the non-trivial task of managing everyone's health and zappy magic bars, including your own, that I can't easily describe. Where you are constantly watching and anticipating and in the split second something happens you need to quickly figure out what it was and how to react because no spell in your kit is a one size fits all bandaid, and choosing wrong has significant long term costs, while in FFXIV using the biggest heal spell you have is rarely the wrong choice.